


That Which We Are

by GrayJay



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: 616 Compliant, Canon Compliant, Classic X-Men, Closeted Character, Death of Wolverine: Life After Logan, Gen, Gratuitous Comics References, Medical Trauma, Needles, New X-Men, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Phoenix Saga, Tennyson, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Uncanny X-Men - Freeform, not a particularly happy story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 15:13:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14167653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrayJay/pseuds/GrayJay
Summary: The day he loses his glasses and brings down half the orphanage is the day he becomes Scott for good.(Or: The universe where Scott isn't born Scott.)





	That Which We Are

**Author's Note:**

> I set out to write a story that fit a trans Cyclops into existing comics canon. As such, it's not a particularly upbeat one--if that's what you need right now, you may want to look elsewhere.

“I know this is a weird question,” Scott tells Corsair, the first time they meet. He’s been working up the courage to ask, to brace himself for what’ll he’ll have to explain; and even now he’s second-guessing it. But he has to know, and he’s come this far.

“I was just wondering—you’ve been—you’re from Earth, right? Have we—Did you ever live in Alaska? It would’ve been—”

“Sorry, kid,” Corsair cuts him off. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

.

Logan is a problem.

He’s gracious to Ororo, and grudgingly civil to the rest of them, but he and Scott get off on the wrong foot, and it only gets worse from there. 

And the worst part, the very worst, is that somehow, Logan _knows_. It’s there in the insufferable smirk every time he calls Scott _Princess_ or makes some snide comment about _growing a pair_ ; and Scott’s not sure which he wants more, to blast Logan through a wall, or to sink through the floor himself. And every time, Logan grins like it’s their little secret; and every time, he gets away with it, because Scott’s the one with everything to lose if he snaps or pushes back. 

He lasts almost a month, until Logan looks him in the eye and says something about Jean, how someday she’s going to go looking for a _real_ man; and Scott very calmly stands up, breaks Logan’s nose and two of his own knuckles, and walks out of the kitchen.

“Was that as satisfying as you imagined?” Ororo asks. Scott hadn’t even heard her coming up behind him.

“Pretty much,” he says. His hand is already starting to swell, but it’s a small price to pay for the moment of surprise and pain on Logan’s face.

“You’ll be feeling it a lot longer than he will,” she points out.

Scott shrugs. “Always do.”

.

At the orphanage, he’s mostly just Summers, which is simple enough, even if nothing else is. The boys and the girls mostly dress about the same, too; and no one cares if he wants to keep his hair short.

So that part is pretty much okay, at least.

“Do you think you’re a boy, or something?” Nate demands one day, while they’re playing cards on the floor.

“Who says I’m not?” Summers asks. New kids always think he is, at first. Staff, too. His heart always sinks a little the first time someone corrects them.

Nate can be capriciously cruel, and Summers is expecting him to tease; but instead, Nate just says, “Hm,” and asks if Summers has a boy name.

He thinks for a minute. “Scout?” he says. He’s not sure where it comes from, but it sounds right. Maybe he knew someone called that, back before. Maybe someone used to call him that.

“That’s not a real name,” says Nate. “You can be Scott, I suppose. It’s close.” 

Scott doesn’t think Dr. Milbury thinks of him as a girl, or a boy, or much of anything beyond—whatever it is Milbury thinks of him as. In Milbury’s lab, he’s not even really a person, and that shouldn’t feel easier, but sometimes it does.

.

He knows he should tell Maddy the truth. They don’t know exactly what the Phoenix did, or what difference it might make down the line. Moira has done round after round of tests: as best she can tell, everything is where it should be; what it should be—as if he had been born like that. 

Still. They don’t know for sure.

He should tell Maddy.

He knows he should.

He doesn’t.

.

There are two photographs in Corsair’s locket.

It’s the boy on the right who makes Scott pause and take a second look: tousled blonde hair and a wide lopsided grin. The dinosaur on his shirt just peeks over the edge of the photo.. _Alex_ , Scott almost says aloud, even though he’s not sure—he’s never sure about things like this, but the place his brother occupies in Scott’s memory is more certain than most.

The girl on the left—

The girl on the left is smiling, too, kind of; but it’s faint and strained, and she’s glancing to one side, like she’s looking for a way out. That Scott expected her doesn’t stop his hands from shaking as he covers her eyes with a finger to study her more familiar features: the tightly drawn mouth, the raised chin. The barrette in her dark hair is askew, already starting to slip.

Scott remembers school picture day—not that particular one, but a fusion of years of them, of standing stiffly in clothes that felt more like a costume than the yellow and black ever have.

He closes the locket and tucks it back into Corsair’s jacket.

.

“Do you ever have trouble getting them to take you seriously?” Scott asks. He’s the youngest crewman by a wide margin; the next is half again his age—not quite old enough to be Lee’s father, but not too far off. 

“What, because I’m a girl?” Lee cracks open her beer, then tosses him the opener. “Nah. They know who’s boss.”

They drink in silence for a while, and then Lee says, “I keep waiting for the day when I wake up with nothing to prove.”

“Sounds nice.” Scott can’t imagine what that would feel like.

“I used to wish I was a boy,” she tells him, and suddenly Scott is paying close attention. He wonders if she’s guessed, somehow. Whether she’s trying to tell him something. “I always imagined it would make things easier. With the boat, my dad—you know? It gets fucking exhausting, always having to swim upstream.”

“I can imagine,” says Scott.

“But fuck it,” Lee tells him with a laugh. “I want it on my own terms, or not at all.”

“And here you are,” Scott echoes.

.

He’s lucky, Dr. Call-Me-Moira MacTaggert tells him with a wry smile. That Dr. Milbury was trying to do—whatever he was trying to do. Control Scott’s powers, probably. That puberty blockers had been part of the regimen. It’s why he still has a boy’s flat chest, why even at fifteen, periods are still only a theoretical terror.

“Do you want Professor Xavier here?” she had asked beforehand, the way she always does. Scott had shaken his head, the way he always does. It’s not like Xavier doesn’t know everything, anyway.

And besides, Scott isn’t scared of Dr. MacTaggert. Anymore. Mostly. She fights with the Professor, sometimes; but with Scott, she keeps her voice carefully even; and she always warns him before she touches him, like she’s afraid he’s going to startle and run (which he’ll admit is probably a reasonable thing to worry about). She never stops talking, really—asking questions, asking for permission—and it’s obvious that he’s supposed to answer, which means he can’t do the thing he wants to do, the thing he did with Dr. Milbury, where he goes _away_ and lets his body and whatever’s being done to it fade to the background. A week ago, she had asked, “Ready?” and he had nodded even though the answer was no (was always no) and sat perfectly still and watched as she worked a needle into his arm and drew up vial after vial of blood. That night, curled in bed, he had pushed his knuckles as hard as he could against the dull ache inside his elbow and then started crying for what he was pretty sure had been no reason at all.

He’s trying not to drift away now, but it’s hard. It only gets harder when she starts to talk about the scar low on the right side of his belly; and the tests she’s been doing since he first arrived; and what’s gone and what’s left; and long-term options that include words like “invasive”; and Scott catches himself flinching away from the ghosts of other people’s hands.

Scott doesn’t want anybody else to touch him, now or ever. He doesn’t want to have a body at all. He wants to curl inward until he disappears.

He realizes he’s tuning Dr. MacTaggert out, and she snaps back into focus just in time for him to hear, “—similar to what Dr. Milbury had you on.” He must have reacted to the name, because her voice gets softer, and she adds, “Obviously this is a very different situation, and we’re not going to do anything without your informed consent. You do understand that, right?”

“No, yeah,” he says. “I know.”

“We can wait a while, if you’d rather,” she tells him. _Why would he?_ Scott wonders, and then he realizes that she’s offering him time, as if another week is all he needs to stop hearing Milbury’s voice every time he walks into an exam room.

“No,” he says. “Sooner would be better. Please.”

She nods.

Scott forces himself to _stay_ , to pay attention. Sits on the table in his boxers and watches Dr. MacTaggert move around the room. Tries to keep breathing as the smell of alcohol threatens to choke him, to pull him back to the lab in the basement; and digs his nails into his palms and stares down as Dr. MacTaggert asks if he’s ready and counts to three, needle hovering over his thigh. _This is mine_ , Scott tells himself, gritting his teeth against the sudden, sharp burn. _This isn’t Milbury’s. This is for me._

.

“I want to see your face,” Jean says, on the butte, and takes his visor off.

.

Corsair’s dog tags say SUMMERS CHRISTOPHER; and AF; and A NEG—which is also Scott’s blood type, and Alex’s—and P, for Protestant. Scott runs his thumb over the raised letters, and imagines the weight around his own neck, the tags cold against his chest. He remembers wearing them, he thinks; running, shrieking with laughter. He remembers someone scooping him up and holding him high overhead, the deep rumble of a voice, the scratch of a rough cheek against his face.

Or maybe he’s just imagining it.

He wonders if Corsair had realized who he was from the start. Whether it would be better or worse if he had, and hadn’t said anything.

Well. It’s not like Scott had remembered his father’s face, either.

.

“You’re awfully good at that, for a guy,” Lee tells him, when he’s curled at the foot of the sweat-damp bunk, head resting on her thigh as they both catch their breath.

.

The day he loses his glasses and brings down half the orphanage is the day he becomes Scott for good.

He never stops worrying that Jack will walk in on him, will notice something, and—he’s heard the way Jack and his friends talk about women. About girls Scott’s age. Sometimes one of them will nod to Scott like he’s in on the joke, and he hates it, but not as much as he’d hate being the subject of it.

He’s lucky, he thinks. That when it comes to Scott, Jack really only wants one thing. He can handle being hit. He doesn’t think he could handle—that.

.

Hank is the one who ultimately walks in on him.

Scott does his own shots now, has ever since Dr. MacTaggert went back to Scotland, and when Hank bursts into the room, Scott startles so hard that he jams an 18-gauge needle straight into his own hand.

He’s thought a lot about the possibility of being caught or confronted, run scenario after scenario in his head, but all of his carefully composed explanations disappear in the moment. He stammers and makes a mess of everything and bleeds through half a dozen tissues while Hank sits on the bed and looks faintly bemused.

Finally, Scott finally manages to string together a few sentences that make sense, and Hank nods gravely. “I see.”

“Are you—okay with this?” Scott forces himself to ask. He has to know. Team dynamics are his responsibility. “If it changes anything—”

“Should it?” Hank asks, seeming genuinely confused; and then, because Scott is still pressing a wad of bloody tissues to the base of his thumb, Hank asks, “Do you need a band-aid?”

Scott starts to say that he’s fine, but what comes out instead is, “Yeah, thanks.”

.

 _Dear Alex,_ Scott writes, _I’m not sure you’ll remember me, but my name is_

He stops. Crumples the paper. Takes a deep breath, and starts again.

_Dear Alex,_

_I’m not sure you’ll remember me, but my name used to be_

.

Scott has never seen himself with facial hair before. He stares at his reflection in the lake, wobbling and unfamiliar; runs a hand over the scruff on his chin and cheeks. He’s shaved daily since before he needed to; and now—

Now he shaves carefully, intentionally, trying not think about how long they might be there. How long it’ll take until he stops needing to shave at all.

He glances down at the lake again. The beard is mostly gone now, and the face staring back up belongs to someone else.

Scott tries to convince himself that he’s surprised.

.

It never occurs to him that Jean wouldn’t know. Not until he tells her about Nathan, and her brow furrows a little, and she asks, “Adopted?”

Scott shakes his head. “No—mine.”

“Wow,” she says. Her eyes travel down his chest, to his belly. “I can’t imagine you—”

“No. God.” He can’t, either. “ _No_. Not like that. It’s—” He stops. Stares at the carpet and worries at his knuckles. They’re always a mess, these days—more than they ever were back on the X-Men, but he hadn’t spent quite as much time screaming into a punching bag back then, either. Usually. “It’s a long story.”

“So I gather,” says Jean, primly. She’s sitting like she’s in the principal’s office—or he is; he’s not sure which—back straight, knees tightly together.

“The Phoenix—” he starts, then stops again. Jean doesn’t say anything.

“The Phoenix,” Scott repeats. “We were—she could control matter at an atomic level. Cellular. She—I don’t know if it was deliberate or reflexive, but—”

Jeans eyes go wide.

“Moira ran tests,” he tells her. “Everything she could think of. It’s like I was born this—even chromosomally, no one would be able to—and with Maddy—I wasn’t sure, but—and then—so, yeah.”

“Wow,” she says. “That’s—that’s wonderful, Scott.” Her voice is shaking, and he can see tears starting to well up at the corners of her eyes.

“Jean—” he starts.

“No,” she says, wiping a hand across her face. “It’s good. I’m happy for you, I really am. It’s just—a lot to take in. That she—” Her voice breaks. “It’s hard. Not to think of it as—one more thing she took away. My face. My life. _You_. I used to think—” She’s crying in earnest, now. 

Scott hovers, unmoored, unsure whether to touch her, what to say.

“I’d give it back,” he says, finally, “if it meant not having lost you.” 

He thinks he might be telling the truth, and that scares him even more than her tears.

.

It’s not the revealing outfits, or the body underneath them, or the implications that accompany both.

It’s the things Emma understands, and the things she refuses to politely ignore. That she knows what it means to tear down and rebuild a self from the ground up.

.

“No, I get it.” Scott can’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Why would you bother with Alex and me when you could have—all that? We’d just have slowed you down.”

His father’s face sags. “Aw, Scout. You know better than that.”

“I really don’t, _Corsair_.” He’s not going to call him _Dad_ , not now, maybe not ever. “I was _ten_. You abandoned us. And then, when you finally do come back, the first thing you do, the very first thing, is lie to me.”

Corsair sighs. “That’s—fair.”

Scott waits.

Corsair runs a hand down his face, like he’s sloughing something off. “It had been so long that—I thought you’d be better off. Without me.” He looks back at Scott. “And look at you. All grown up. A hero.” He looks _proud_ , and it turns Scott’s stomach.

“ _A hero_ ,” he repeats, numbly. “You can’t even—” Corsair opens his mouth to say something, but Scott cuts him off. “ _No_. You don’t get to—not after—you have _no idea_ what my life has been like.”

“Scout,” says Corsair, then corrects himself. “Scott. I know it can’t have been easy—”

Scott walks away.

.

“Guys like us,” Logan tells him, “We don’t get to quit.”

.

He remembers being happy, back in Alaska—climbing trees, chasing Alex in the yard, reassembling an engine while Dad offered advice. Maybe it hadn’t mattered much, there. Being a girl.

“What if it’s from the accident?” he asks Professor Xavier, “Like, because of the brain damage? Or something Dr. Milbury did, or—”

“Do you think that’s what it is?” the Professor asks.

Scott shakes his head. Figuring out what parts of himself count as real, count as _him_ , has never been easy. He suspects that might have been true before, too; but there’s really no way to be sure.

“Would it matter, if it were?” the Professor asks.

He has to think about that. He knows he’s not the same person he almost remembers being in the hazy traces of Alaska. But then, he’s not the same person he was when he ran away from the orphanage, either.

Xavier closes his eyes. “ _Yet all experience is an arch_ ,” he says. His voice is soft, melodic, almost a chant. “ _wherethro' gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades for ever and forever when I move_.”

He opens his eyes. Scott waits.

“Tennyson,” the Professor explains. “Ulysses. Our experiences change us, shape the people we become. Are you or I who we might have been under different circumstances? Surely not. And yet, here we are, and here lie the choices before us.”

“Can you tell?” Scott asks him. “What I would have—how I would have ended up?”

“No, Scott,” says the Professor. “Not even I can tell you that.”

.

It’s a little funny that Alex has an older sister now. Considering.

.

“Why not?” asks Hank. “I might as well be. I’ve been taunted all my life for my individualistic looks and style of dress. I’ve been hounded and called names in the street, and I’ve risen above it.”

“You know damn well why not,” Scott tells him. “Because you’re _not_ , and this isn’t—these are people’s lives, Hank. It’s not just a game of dress-up, or a—a political statement.”

Hank shrugs. “We should really have more intersectional representation on the team. Maybe if the more qualified would rise to the occasion, I wouldn’t feel so morally obligated to step up.”

“You pretended to be gay for revenge on Trish,” Scott points out. “You do _not_ get to claim the high road.”

“Oh?” Hank is a portrait of feile disdain. “Do you really want to lecture me on honesty, Fearless Leader? Or perhaps you’re volunteering to take over as faculty sponsor of the Student Alliance? Because I’m sure they could use a role-model who—”

Hank must realize how far below the belt he’s hitting, because he stops and clasps his hands behind his back. “I’m sorry, Scott,” he says. “That was out of line. I know it’s not the same.”

“No,” says Scott, “It’s really not.” He’s thought about it before, what it would mean to be out. But it’s too much, too big, too overwhelming. And even without the personal considerations, he’s not going to paint another target on the school, on the kids. 

He knows he’s lucky—for some value of the term—that it’s a choice at all. The precautions Sinister took in order to experiment on Sara Summers with impunity mean that Scott Summers will never have to worry about a journalist stumbling across his original birth certificate. The Phoenix has effectively taken care of any other avenue of accidental discovery, and with them the continual terror of getting injured in the field, being in the wrong bathroom at the wrong time. The only other person on earth who could say anything—the only one who knew him _then_ —is Alex; and for all their petty bickering and even all the fights in earnest, Scott knows his brother well enough to know that Alex will never, ever cross that line.

All of which makes Scott that much more acutely aware of his own hypocrisy. And he knows how Hank feels about closets. About hiding.

He wonders if Trish was the only person Hank had been aiming to strike at with his stunt.

“I’ll think about it,” he tells Hank. 

Hank nods.

They both know Scott is telling the truth—just like they both know what he’ll ultimately decide.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Tennyson's "Ulysses," the same poem Xavier quotes in the story.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] That Which We Are](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16134692) by [GoLBPodfics (digiella)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/digiella/pseuds/GoLBPodfics)




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